Car manufacturers continue to investigate ways to improve the performance of vehicle passenger restraint systems having airbags for front seat passengers. Typical restraint systems for front seat passengers include a powerful inflator device that deploys a somewhat large airbag to rapidly occupy a generally large volume of space aft of the windshield and the dashboard. Furthermore, the front passenger airbag can have a split lobe configuration to allocate more cushioning force on an occupant's shoulders, as compared to the occupant's head. To that end, these airbags can have multiple elongated thin straps that are individually sown to various portions of the airbag in order to provide the split lobe configuration. The somewhat large number and complicated configuration of these tethers can lead to cumbersome manufacture of the airbags thereby increasing costs related to the same.
A need exists for a passenger airbag that can be quickly deployed to reduce longitudinal translation of the airbag, require a lower cost of production and reallocate forces imparted by the airbag on portions of the occupant's body.